Crackling on a track in Mediamonkey but not in vlc/foobar

[MicrORDwave]

Hi all,

I've lately stumbled across a very strange problem with Mediamonkey playing crackling noises (always at the same spot on the track, in the same way every time) while VLC and foobar don't have the crackling sound. My windows default Media Player produces the crackling too.

I've tried everything from changing the input codecs to LAV filters, updating/downgrading drivers and firmware on my external DAC, testing with the motherboard's own sound card, changing the output codec from WASAPI to WASAPI exclusive to ASIO etc, even doing windows in-place upgrades to get old legacy directshow/com framework dlls and such. I've also verified the crackling on a fresh portable install of MediaMonkey_2024.2.1.3208.

I couldn't really find anything on the forums about this, though Gemini is convinced that it's because of Windows moving away from Directshow and over to Media Foundation. I'm generally leery of LLMs though and it's not been able to fix the issue despite me trying everything it said, so I'm hoping the folks here might have some advice.

Ordinarily I would think it's just poor mastering on the track itself, but the fact that the exact same mp3 file played on vlc/foobar2000 doesn't produce the crackle leaves me dissatisfied with simply living with this. I have no idea how to, or if attaching files is even allowed, but if anyone can help me out here, it would be much appreciated.

Have a good week ahead!

[Lowlander]

Can you supply the file to Support?